History speaks truth to power once more.
You might be steeling yourself to walk out of
Good Night, and Good Luck
, fearing it'll be excessively didactic in its explanation of McCarthyism and the Red Scare, and just another yawn-inducing spectacle of leftist Hollywood defending its own. Fear not, and stay put: George Clooney's directed a film that's risky, funny and dark, dark, dark.
It's hard to remember a time when corporate couldn't quite control editorial; when television reporters were still gentlemen of the press who wrote their stories; when female colleagues were all affectionately called "dear" and anchors appeared live on the news with cigarettes burning indifferently in their fingers. The face of CBS News then was the saturnine mug of Edward R
Murrow (David Strathairn), who, along with his producer and co-writer Fred Friendly (Clooney), dared to speak out against the junior senator from Wisconsin and his House Committee on Un-American Activities. If you don't know the story, so much the better-Clooney and Heslov's screenplay has the urgency of William Goldman's
All the President's Men
, as staff researchers run into the studio with reels of film to be cut and spliced practically seconds before they're broadcast.
As that sometimes dicey creature, a director appearing in his own film, the best thing Clooney does is to do very little. He's unusually restrained, staying out of his fantastic cast's ballistic path-particularly Strathairn, a working actor's actor who's been in more than 70 films, from
LA Confidential
to
A League of Their Own
. He's more Murrow than Murrow was, with bags under his eyes, clouds of silvery chain-smoking exhalations and the unsmiling stern ferocity of a hardened politico. The supporting cast couldn't be tighter, with timing like a Cary-Grant-Rosalind-Russell comedy and constant journalistic smart-alecking; these guys can quip in the face of any horror ("I'm a little busy bringing down the network tonight, Bill"). For once, even Robert Downey, Jr. can't steal every scene he's in; when he and Patricia Clarkson are informed that one or both of them will need to resign, they sit stunned for a beat, and then Clarkson says throatily, "Well, we sure are gonna miss you around here." Combine all this with sleek period details like vacuum-tube broadcasting equipment and a silk-voiced jazz singer; add gorgeous long expanses of uncut newsreel footage (starring Joe McCarthy as himself) and you get classic, compelling cinema that's unfortunately also all too pertinent.
